


glitter in the air

by Eireanne_catches_rye



Series: 90s AU [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: 90s AU, Alternate Universe - 1990s, F/M, Multi, No Incest, Polyamory, Pre-Slash, Recreational Drug Use, pre-ed/roy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:53:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28885680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eireanne_catches_rye/pseuds/Eireanne_catches_rye
Summary: (in which boys climb through her second story window and they’re all delinquents in some way or another)Winry wears glitter eye makeup and loves her boys a lot (Ed x Winry, Winry x Al)(tw: drug use, nebulously-aged young adults doing adult things, unusual relationships, but also not thoroughly unhealthy ones.)
Relationships: Alphonse Elric/Winry Rockbell, Edward Elric/Winry Rockbell
Series: 90s AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2118369
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	glitter in the air

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that while throughout the story Winry is romantically involved with both Edward and Alphonse, I want to drive home this is not Elricest. They're both aware of the situation and just don't see it as a concern in their admittedly bizarre relationship.
> 
> This is part of a growing monster in my mind set in the mid-90s, and this is basically the lead up to the main events of a much longer Roy x Ed piece.
> 
> This was really just an accidental little side piece to that, but this developed so quickly that I figured I might as well get it out while I could. I binge wrote this last night and finished and edited it this morning so I’m sure there are plenty of things I’ll have to go back through and edit again later. Also I kind of wanted to keep with my recent trend of posting around US political holidays.
> 
> I'd personally like to thank living in a legal state and my partner for lending me their laptop when my 7 year old dell died.

glitter in the air

(Ed x Winry, Winry x Al)

I

Winry isn’t entirely sure why they insist on using the window sometimes when she knows they both have keys to the front door. She was the one after all who weaved the plastic scoubidous they all used as matching keyrings since Ed wouldn’t agree to the matching necklaces and she’d already made them both boys enough friendship bracelets that they could probably wear them all at once and call them deconstructed arm warmers. 

She’s not complaining though. 

Really, she’s not. She’s basically living every straight teenage girl’s dream but on _steroids_ because she doesn’t just have _one_ cute boy-next-door sneaking in through her window but _two_. 

It’s just the coming in through her window part she doesn’t entirely get it, because her grandmother knows both boys and loves them as her own. They don’t need to sneak in and out her window when they can walk through the front door any time of day and Granny wouldn’t even blink.

They’re all living breathing teenage stereotypes, but funny enough it’s Ed who’s of the opinion Winry needs to stop reading teen magazines. “Everyone’s gonna start thinking you’re just some vapid bimbo.” He complains, “Half of this stuff was made by children in factories and buying it just buys into capitalism--” or something like that. Winry just sort of tunes out whenever he gets momentum going on that certain train... but she gets the gist of it all.

She’s heard it enough times already because he goes off on his tirade everytime he notices she’s bought something new from the mall. Which is admittedly often, and yeah she probably should cut back (but she probably won’t cause it’s fun).

In Winry’s defence, she just wants to reflect the times. Celebrate them. At least she can admit that, unlike Ed who flocked to the otherside of the spectrum and sulks in his flannels and punk-rock band tees. She likes to argue with him that by not making a statement he is in fact, making quite the statement. They’re both going to look back on photos in a decade and wonder what they were thinking after all. Ed took to the grunge scene like a fish to water. He was practically born to it with his too-clingy, thrift store jeans and thread-worn flannels. And the oversized leather jacket she’s not sure where came from, but has seemingly always had.

She thinks it makes him look even more petite than he really is. But he doesn’t take anything seriously coming from a girl in pink jelly sandals. Which admittedly hurt her feet if she wears them without socks. Which she does, girlish white ones with glittery lace trim.

Because Winry? Winry lives for glitter.

She wears glitter eye shadow and even has a grain of rice with her name in a bottle on a cord dangling around her neck and into her pretty cleavage. She likes her bikini small, her jeans low, and uses body sprays liberally. She listens to the SpiceGirls, rolls body glitter on her cheeks and wears dainty novelty rings she got out of a coin operated gumball machine, the kind that turns her fingers green which Ed points out when she flashes him her middle finger.

Ed doesn’t think all of her interests are stupid and superficial. He’d never denounce her superior coding skills, or her far-greater-advanced mechanical engineering abilities. He never complains about the pile of retired models lining her shelves or the computer she’s constantly tweaking and upgrading on her desk. 

He only has a problem with the _girly_ things about her. 

Always critically eyeing the feather boas hanging over her bedpost or the beaded curtain separating her closet from the rest of the room. His sharp eyes seemingly always drawn to the brightly cosmetics scattered amongst the dull glint of computer parts on her vanity.

She twists back the bit of hair that always dangles into his eyes and pins it out of the way with a translucent red butterfly clip. He frowns at her but also doesn’t pull it out so she counts it as a win. (But she also counted it as a win the last time she did this when he snatched it out of his hair and almost tore out a chunk of hair.)

-

Al doesn’t have the same need to wear the unique moment of time on his person like Ed and Winry do. You could take a snapshot of Al, stain it with tea and say he was from the dawn of photography and no one would tell you differently with his pale button up and tidy denim pants. 

He’s a classic like that.

Al always gives off the impression of being an astronaut in the alien environment of her bedroom, delicately inspecting her trinkets and opening things and sniffing them.

“How are you not hungry all the time wearing this?” He asks lolling his head back against the back of her desk chair. He’s holding a tube of lipgloss, “It smells like candy and it’s right under your nose all day!”

Because this is Al who borrows her bucket hats and gets just as excited as her whenever she gets a new scented lotion. Sometimes she puts a little in his hands and he cups it to his nose to sniff before he rubs it in, as if revelling in the simple luxury of off-brand Warm Vanilla Sugar she got from the dollar store around the corner. 

Al will pick a tiny Bon-Bon of nailpolish from her window sill and sit patiently while she paints his toes and complains about her shitty day at school. (Ed will also let her paint his nails, but only if the color is appropriately black and somber)

They take quizzes from her magazines together, but Al likes it best when she reads their horoscopes, taking in the (admittedly vague) advice with a slight, but serious nod. Ed always whines whether the prediction warrants bad news or good news. She just chalks it up to him being an Aquarius. Which never fails to frustrate him more.

She writes them both love notes on cheap colorful stationary with cheap colorful gel pens, but the content itself is rich.

(Al keeps them carefully folded and filed in a shoebox under his bed. The pocket of Ed’s jacket that sits over his heart however is filled with crumpled notes like “u smell bad” and “wash urself” with doodles of things like shrimp and ants just incase he wasn’t sure who she was writing them for.)

-

Winry has to try the bic lighter several times before she gets it to strike. It’s older, one of the first she ever got, and she’s pretty sure Ed lifted it from the mall specifically for her, since it’s sheer pink and glittery and Ed only ever uses the shiny silver one he never lets anyone else touch. 

Eventually she gets it to spark and praises it, because it’s old and she’s sentimental. 

She drops it into the jewelry box on her dresser and watches the tiny porcelain ballerina inside make a few slow, delicate turns as she waves the incense lazily to put out the flame until the tip smolders into smoke and embers.

She hears Al sigh loudly and shut his text book with a loud muffled thud.

“I guess you two are done getting stuff done today.” He sighed, flopping back on her carpet dramatically. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She teased him waving the stick of incense in his face like a wagging finger. He swiped it away, knocking ash onto his forehead. He scrunched his nose at her

“Yeah, Al,” Ed said with a grin, pulling the mint tin winry kept in her desk out. “Whatever do you mean?”

Al doesn’t like it when they do drugs, but then again Al also can’t hold his beer and still can’t remember a damn thing from the time they’d taken some Molly at a rave. (Which is fine, because Ed and Winry do and they like to take turns embellishing the events in question just to make Al squirm.)

Usually the lighting of the incense would begin his anti-drug campaign speech, but he skips the lecture this time for a slight shake of his head. “You guys have your fun. I want to get to the library and do a little more work on this project for history.” He kisses Winry on the forehead and smacks Ed on the back of his head as he stands up, dodging a punch to the back of his knees with a slight twirl. 

“You two behave, I’ll be back in an hour.” He says with a devious grin, drawing a very pointed look line between the two of them with his eyes. He’s gone with a swing of his jacket and a snap of the door. She drops her textbook on top of Al’s discarded one. With every year it’s gotten easier to tell them apart; Al’s wrapped in brown grocer’s bags, Winry’s wrapped with the logo of a Gap shopping bag prominently on the front. Ed’s are probably still in his locker at school where they’ve been since the second week back. That was just his style. Binge read the entire book in the first week and then coast through school for the rest of the year, barely showing up but acing every test and upsetting everyone who wasn’t Al or Winry.

Ed lights the joint between his lips and takes a longer drag than he usually would. She adjusts herself so her skirt falls back against her more invitingly, and his long exhale chokes into a sudden cough.

She smirks at him and he glowers back, thumping his chest heartily before thrusting the joint back in her direction. 

“You still have an issue with the way I dress?”

“Uh, yeah it’s atrocious, you uh, dress yourself badly, you bad... girl. You.” She took a long pause to stare at him, before taking an even longer pull off the joint. Dirty talk was not an Elric specialty. 

But then Ed is pulling her so carefully back into him and leaning her back and a waft of incense drifts between them; then the last remaining distance between them disappears as if it too was vapor.

-

Al leans back in the swivel chair in front of her vanity, what should have been a sultry mauve spread across his lips. It does something weird to her stomach, something dangerously beyond arousal unfurling there as she leaned forward to take the lipstick tube from his fingers.

She wipes his attempt away, and lifts his chin with her thumb, the rest of her fingers curling into his hair. And his eyes are a little bit wider than normal as she gently dabs the dusty shade on with her finger.

“See? You don’t have to put lipstick on like a two dollar hooker.” She said, kissing his forehead.

“Why not?” He mumbles, pulling her down into his lap, “I learned from watching you after all.”

She smacks him playfully on the side of his head and he winces.

(and then hits him again, gentler) 

(with her lips)

(on his.)

(y’know, just to get a good taste of her handy work.)

-

She wonders if, and then decides that they are all (in fact) very fucked up.

-

It works like this up until it doesn’t.

Ed says he loves her, that he _always_ will, but he thinks its time to stop fucking around. Time for her and Al to focus on just themselves, make it work. Be real, be functional for once in their lives. He tells her this all privately, that if he and Al are gonna make a break away for safety and normal life they might as well start now.

...And Winry agrees.

Agrees because what they’ve had up to this point only worked because none of them were willing to touch it. Like a carefully crafted house of cards. They worked because-- _don’t touch it that’s why._

And Ed has done what Ed does best and pointed out the obvious, and now it's glaring back at them.

Less things change than you’d think after that.

Ed still complains about her latest acquisitions, she still writes him the sweetest notes like, “ur small” and “ant boy”. She even buys shrimp shaped stationary so he knows she thought of him specifically.

The three of them still sneak into the movies together. Al, ever suffering from a terminal case of good-consciousness and being the pure hearted being that he is, still makes a point of actually purchasing tickets to the movie whenever he can. Ed still bails if he doesn’t like the movie they’ve picked, or so he’ll say when he’s frowning down at his pager and pulling on his jacket. Al watches him go with a look in his eyes Winry has never seen there before. But they settle back into their evening plans anyways and she puts it out of mind.

(but just when exactly did _Ed_ get a _pager_?)

There’s not really less Ed in her life, there’s just more Al.

Her letters to Al get longer and longer each time she writes them, to the point her cheap gel pens dry up mid thought and she has to reach for another. She’s not sure how she always has so much to say to him when they’ve known each other their whole lives, minus the six months and three days she was alive before he was born at least. She should know everything about him by now.

Or at least she thought she did. 

She realizes she knew a lot of things, like how she knew Ed hated milk, but didn’t know Al hated green onions just as badly. She knew how Ed felt about their shitty dad stepping out on them as kids. But she didn’t know how Al felt about the man. 

She still doesn’t.

She brings it up one night when it’s just the two of them up stupidly late the night before a big exam, but he skirts the question entirely. 

“I just like to keep that to myself.” Is all he tells her after a few minutes of dodging and deflecting. Which is fair she supposes, even if the concept feels new and unnatural.

….But it turns out they’ve both kept some important things from her after all.

It’s not until Al gets taken as collateral and Ed won’t let her help, that things finally start to make more sense, like puzzle pieces coming together. 

But she sees the way Ed looks at the man who he does. That tentative hope and barely veiled desperation for reciprocation and validation. How Roy barely seems to recognize the trust, the meaning behind accepting his aide. She understands then, that she and Al weren’t the only ones who needed to see what was real. 

I

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. 
> 
> As always kudos and comments fill the void and are the perfect fuel for the writing machine I aspire to become.


End file.
